Windows 10 now has 120 million activations thanks mostly to the fact that Microsoft is offering for free to Windows 7, 8 and 8.1 users. Now Redmond has told its OEM chums they need to prepare to stop selling Windows 7 Professional from October 31 2016.

Microsoft has chosen exactly the same date to stop selling Windows 8.1 while it will urge its OEM's to stop selling Windows 8 starting from June 30 2016. Until now Microsoft set October 31 2014 as the end of sales for new consumer-grade Windows 7 PCs, but for now has left open the do-not-sell-after-this-date for business machines which have the Windows PRO handle.

Windows 7 has been with us since October 22 2009, or six years ago. Microsoft will give it one more year and then the Windows 7, the one that was codenamed Vienna will mean nothing to us. Until that time, or roughly a year from today OEM partners will still be able to sell Windows 7 powered machines.

Windows 7 will still be supported unitl 2020, so there is plenty of life in this operating system. Windows 8 will receive support at least until 2023. Many business users still prefer Windows 7 to rather new Windows 10. ATMs around the world use to run Windows XP and just got the update to a "newer" version of Windows.

Sony has confirmed that the PlayStation 3 will get system update 4.30 starting on October 23rd. The big deal with this update is that you can view PlayStation Vita game trophies on your PlayStation 3.

As with the recent Microsoft dashboard update for the Xbox 360, Sony will be taking some stuff away, as well. Life with PlayStation application will no longer be offered to new users starting with the 4.30 update. In addition, support for the Folding@Home distributed computing project will also be coming to an end.

Sony claims that the PS3 was a game changer for Folding@Home, with it being an exceptional way to use the GPU inside the PS3. Over 15 million users have participated in the Folding@Home program and have contributed more than 100 million computational hours to the project.

Frank O’Connor, Halo Franchise development director, has confirmed that there is no Kinect support for gameplay in Halo 4.

O’Conner said, “Waypoint is more appropriate for Kinect.” Microsoft and 343 Industries never announced Kinect support for Halo 4, but many believed that it would offer some sort of Kinect support. According to O’Connor, Kinect support was not really suited for the core mechanics of Halo 4.

Halo Waypoint will get Kinect support at some point in the future, but it is yet to be determined when that will be coming to Waypoint. While some thought that Kinect supported controller for Halo might have been something that players wanted, it isn’t the kind of experience that would work well, if you ask us. On the other hand, voice navigation of Waypoint using Kinect would be cool.

Microsoft’s Windows XP operating system may have been all the rage once, but it’s pretty clear that its future holds nothing but that colorful place in winheaven, where operating systems go to die.

Upcoming Assasin’s Creed 3 is among the latest games to dump XP for its shiny siblings. The game’s minimum requirements list Core 2 Duo E6700/Athlon 64 X2 6000+ and 512MB DirectX 9.0c-compliant card with Shader Model 4.0 but XP support is gone.

The Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 team has also decided against supporting old-man-XP and it appears as if it’s just a matter of time before actual inclusion of it becomes newsworthy. Naturally, both these games will support Vista, 7 and 8.

Having said that, yours truly would rather put a finger in his eye and twirl it around singing “Shiny Happy People” than spend another minute in Vista. Heck, even Windows 3.1 suddenly started sounding like music to my ears.

Intel has confirmed that it will be running behind the other mobile chipmakers with LTE adoption.

It seems that the lack of LTE is making it difficult for Chipzilla to flog its Medfield chips in the US. Apparently, the only company that can get away with flogging LTE-less phones is Apple, which only recently put one out.

According to TechCrunch, Sumeet Syal, Intel’s Director of Product Marketing, confirmed that 4G support is in the pipeline. However, it will not be ramping up until 2013.

But that is not the only place that Intel is behind the rest of the pack. App compatibility is another area where Intel is having to play catch up.

Intel said that it is working closely with Google to optimize its chip architecture for Android, since not all Android apps are compatible with Intel’s SoCs, including Google’s own Chrome for Android browser. Syal insisted that the “majority” of Android apps are compatible with Medfield chips but was not specific.

In an interesting turn of events, it would appear that Need for Speed: Most Wanted, due to be released soon from Electronic Arts and developer Criterion, will apparently offer more than just Kinect support.

The latest box art that we are seeing for the PlayStation 3 version of the game indicates that it also offers Move support. The box art indicates that it is “PlayStation Move Compatible,” which seems to indicate that it has been included.

While the Kinect support was indicated in the first wave of box art for the game, we were unable to see indications of support for PlayStation Move. So far, Electronic Arts and Criterion have remained quiet on what support might be included beyond the typical use of the controller. We suspect that we will hear something more official when we get a little closer to release.

In an interview with Games, Epic Gears of War creator Cliff Bleszinski confirms that the upcoming Gears of War: Justice will not be supporting Kinect. While CliffyB is a fan of the technology, he does not see it as a fit for Gears of War: Justice.

Bleszinski says that he also believes that the full potential of the device has yet to be realized. In addition, he wonders how the technology will work with “core” games.

Epic announced back in April of last year a project called Gears of War: Exile that was to be a shooter that supported and used the Kinect technology. While it has been rumored to have been canceled, its exact status remains a bit of a mystery for the time being, while the studio continues its focus on the title called Fortnite, best described as a scavenging adventure title.

Before those considering a purchase of a Wii U get too excited, Dustin Browder (who is a lead designer for StarCraft II) has apparently commented to Kotaku that StarCraft II might work on the Wii U, but don’t count on it ever happening, as the PC is still the optimal platform for the title.

In what seems like some theorizing, Browder talks about some of the concepts that the StarCraft team have seen and considered to bring the title to the console world; from what he says, it just does not work very well for the effort that must go into a console game.

Control is the most important, and Browder suggests that you don’t want to play a game where it feels like you are battling the interface rather than playing the game.

While we have heard a number of rumors that Activision is going to support the new Nintendo Wii U with titles, we have heard little from Activision in this regard. Eric Hirshberg, the head of publishing at Activision, has finally officially confirmed that the company will be supporting the Wii U, which is good news for Nintendo.

Despite the rumors that a Skylanders title, as well as a Call of Duty title, was headed to the Wii U, Hirshberg claims that the company isn’t in a hurry to announce anything; and they want to get their ducks in a row before making any official announcements as far as specific titles and such.

So, basically what you have is Activision confirming that at least some Activision titles will be coming for the Wii U. While rumors have said that we will see a version of Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 for the Wii U and a Skylanders title, Activision isn’t yet ready to confirm this. We suspect, however, that once we get closer to the official launch of the Wii U, we will see Activision start to make its Wii U announcements.

Of course, the confirmation of the new Nintendo Pro Controller has helped the situation with developers who were not sure if Nintendo really planned to target the console at hard core gamers. Many developers feel that the Pro Controller is necessary to be able to provide the proper kind of experience with some titles.

Microsoft has confirmed that going forward that the company is planning that all of its first-party titles will include Xbox 360 SmartGlass support. The title itself will depend on the features of SmartGlass that will be used, but the company is looking for immersion with the addition of SmartGlass support.

While the SmartGlass support is set to arrive in the fall, it is still a bit up in the air as to which titles will offer support for it. While some titles/applications will get updates that will add SmartGlass support, that will be the exception more than the rule. Currently, Microsoft has no count on how many SmartGlass-enabled titles will be released before the end of the year.

While the technology does look very interesting, analysts tell us (and we agree with their evaluation) that SmartGlass has a lot more questions than answers, and we still need to see it working and incorporated in more titles/applications before we can see if consumers respond to SmartGlass. Still, the end of the year is much close than one would think.